The Fifth Risk(41)
That was the turning point for David Friedberg. He realized that the people most exposed to the weather and most receptive to insuring themselves against it were farmers. The Farmers’ Almanac had offered them weather predictions for the growing season since 1792, but those predictions had never been any better than guessing. The U.S. Department of Agriculture offered insurance against catastrophic crop loss but still left farmers with lots of exposure. There was a need. There was also a problem: to evaluate the weather risk to any one farmer’s crop, Friedberg would need to predict not just the weather but how any given field responded to it. What kind of soil did it have? How well did it retain water? The question became: Where might he find this kind of data?
Once again, the U.S. government had it. NOAA had forty years’ worth of infrared satellite images of all the land in the United States—again on tape drives in some basement. Plants absorb visible light and emit infrared light: you could calculate the biomass in a field by how much infrared light it emitted. Friedberg brokered a deal with Google, which had digitized the information and gave him access to it for free. “That’s when we discovered that farmers were lying about the dates they were planting,” said Friedberg. The federal crop insurance program, seeking to minimize the risk of freeze, stipulated the earliest date that a farmer was allowed to plant. But the earlier the seeds went into the ground, the richer the crop. To qualify for the insurance, farmers had been claiming to have planted their seeds later than they had. The lie had been captured for decades by satellite, but no one had been able to see the data.
Inside the Department of Agriculture, Friedberg’s math team found data on the size and shape of every one of America’s twenty-six million fields. Inside the Department of the Interior, they found data on the soil composition of those fields. “They said,‘No one has ever asked us for this,’” said Friedberg. That one database was so big that it couldn’t be transmitted over the internet. He’d had to pay the government agency to send it on hard drives, which he then sent to engineers at Amazon, who moved it all to the cloud. In each of the six years from 2007 to 2013, Friedberg’s company used forty times more data than the year before. “All this data, it would never have existed if not for the government infrastructure that collected it,” said Friedberg. “There’s no private institution that on their own would have collected it. And without it we couldn’t have made predictions. We would never have had a business without that data. But by the time we were done, we could really quantify the effects of weather on farming.”
In 2011 Friedberg decided to sell exclusively to farmers, and WeatherBill changed its name to The Climate Corporation. “We needed to feel a little less Silicon Valley and less whimsical,” said Friedberg. For the next few years he would spend half his time on the road, explaining himself to people whose first step was toward mistrust. “Farmers don’t believe anything,” he said. “There’s always been some bullshit product for farmers. And the people selling it are usually from out of town.”
He’d sit down in some barn or wood shop, pull out his iPad, and open up a map of whatever Corn Belt state he happened to be in. He’d let the farmer click on his field. Up popped the odds of various unpleasant weather events—a freeze, a drought, a hailstorm—and his crops’ sensitivity to them. He’d show the farmer how much money he would have made in each of the previous thirty years if he had bought weather insurance. Then David Friedberg, Silicon Valley kid, would teach the farmer about his own fields. He’d show the farmer exactly how much moisture the field contained at any given moment—above a certain level, the field would be damaged if worked on. He’d show him the rainfall and temperature every day—which you might think the farmer would know, but then the farmer might be managing twenty or thirty different fields, spread over several counties. He’d show the farmer the precise stage of growth of his crop, the best moments to fertilize, the optimum eight-day window to plant his seeds, and the ideal harvest date.
The fertilizer was a big deal to them. “The biggest expense farmers have is fertilizer,” said Friedberg. “They’ll spend a hundred bucks an acre on corn seed and two hundred bucks on fertilizer. And their net profit might be a hundred bucks an acre. If it rains right after you fertilize, the fertilizer washes away. So how do you decide when to plant and when to fertilize? I had guys come up to me after and say,‘You saved me four hundred grand last year.’”
Farming had always involved judgment calls that turned on the instincts of the farmer. The Climate Corporation had turned farming into decision science, and a matter of probabilities. The farmer was no longer playing roulette but blackjack. And David Friedberg was helping him to count the cards. “For a lot of these guys it was like,‘My mind is blown,’” Friedberg recalled. “They didn’t believe that the knowledge could be created. All the new technology they had ever seen in their lives was physical. New machines, new seeds, new kinds of fertilizer. All these had just been tools for the farmer to use. None of them had replaced the farmer.” No one ever asked Friedberg the question: If my knowledge is no longer useful, who needs me? But it was a good question. “There is stuff the farmer picks up on that we haven’t got data on yet,” he said. “For example, are there bugs in the field? But over time that’ll go to zero. Everything will be observed. Everything will be predicted.”